Living in Information - Jorge Arango

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wonder what this button does? Oh, I see—that means right align.”) The set of words, phrases, icons, and other semantic elements in Microsoft Word’s user interface creates a semantic environment that should make it possible for Lillian to achieve her goal of writing a document. How much instruction she will require to learn the particularities of the environment depends on many factors, including her level of experience with similar applications.

      Microsoft Word is a general-purpose application; its potential user base is anyone who needs to write something. That’s a very broad remit! Because of this, Word’s designers need to be careful with the language they select so that it’s common enough to be broadly understood, yet particular enough so that users know what they can do in the various parts of the application. Other applications have narrower audiences. For example, I once worked on the design of a software system that served as a marketplace for buyers and sellers of energy in regional electricity grids. This was a job with a very particular vocabulary that was only meaningful to the people who worked in this industry. Terms and acronyms that might have been completely baffling to you and me were obvious to these people when used in this context. Since the software that would support their goals would not be used by a general audience, the semantic environment manifested in its user interface leveraged the industry’s specialized language to reduce the new user’s learning curve.

      As a mental exercise, try examining a website or app’s navigation system in the absence of company names or logos. How much do the navigation systems tell you about what the place is? How does this change what you understand them to mean?

      Here’s an example:

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      I’ve covered the logos on this website so that you can’t tell which company it is. (Although if you live in the U.S., you may be able to guess from the colors.) Look at the words on the navigation bars. You don’t need to know anything else about this environment to guess that you’re in a bank. One of the labels even says it outright: “Banking.” This changes the meaning of the other words there. For example, the word “Learning” could point to many things. However, knowing that you’re in a bank helps you constrain the possible meanings of “learning” to something like “educational material for becoming more financially savvy.”

      To summarize, the words you use in the navigation systems and headings of websites not only help you find what you’re looking for, but they also help you understand what you’re looking at. This particular group of words set in this particular order creates a context that gives the meaning to the whole picture. They tell you where you are and what you can do there.

       You Are Here

      Let’s stop again for another moment. Focus your attention on your surroundings and then come back to this paragraph. Hopefully by now it’s clear how the environment you’re in creates a context that is conducive to your activity of reading. (Or perhaps it doesn’t—in either case, you’re part of a context that is affecting your behavior.)

      While you don’t experience them as physical places, websites and apps are also environments. The user interface of a word processor creates a context that affects how you think about what you can do within it, much as a church or a library does. This context is a semantic environment that influences your thinking and behavior. When you’re working in a word processor, processing words is what you do. Those words end up in a document that you save in a filesystem, which is another semantic environment that has been established by a software user interface. It’s context all the way down!

      Whether you’re designing a physical environment (such as a church) or an information environment (such as a word processor), you must be aware that you are creating a context that will affect how its users behave in it. The success of the design depends on whether or not it supports the goals its users have for the sort of place it creates. But there is another important set of goals the environment must accommodate: those of its creators. Lillian wants to be able to easily curate a document, and Microsoft wants to continue to generate revenues from providing access to its software. Successful environments bring these goals into balance. The next chapter examines what motivates people to behave in specific ways in their environments and what the incentives are that lead them to design environments to influence those behaviors.

      It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

      —Upton Sinclair

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       Incentives

      The next time you walk into a bank branch—even an old one, like One Montgomery—take some time to consider your behavior. You speak a certain way when you’re in a bank. You walk to certain areas in the space and not others. If there are other people waiting to be helped, you wait in line. Why do you act like this when you’re there? Does the organization of the environment have anything to do with your behavior? The answer to this question is yes: the environments you inhabit have an important effect on your behavior.

      Since this is the case, it’s important to examine why you use and create different types of environments. You go to bank branches for different reasons than those that compel you to visit football stadiums. Banking and sporting events fulfill different social needs, and these needs require different ways of acting. Our species has developed particular types of places that influence our behavior in ways that are conducive to meeting these social needs. Underlying it all are incentives that motivate you to act in particular ways.

      For example, if you’re like most bank customers, your goal in using the bank branch is to do your banking there as quickly and efficiently as possible and then leave. If you behave with civility while there, following directions and standing in line patiently awaiting your turn, you are rewarded with prompt service. However, if you cause a ruckus, whooping and hollering (something that wouldn’t be unseemly in the stadium) or jumping the line, you may get in trouble. And if you attempt to enter certain parts of the environment (e.g., the vault) without permission, you may be arrested. Both of these latter outcomes are at odds with your goal of being done with your transaction as quickly as possible.

      On the flip side, the bank is also subject to incentives. If it doesn’t offer you a particular level of service—for example, if you have to stand in line for too long—you may switch to a competitor. Thus, it is in the bank’s best interest to encourage certain behaviors and discourage others. In controlling the environment where the interaction happens, the bank has a great deal of influence in how you behave while you’re there.

      Let’s look at this example in more detail. The internal layout of many bank branches imposes a separation between the bank’s tellers and its customers. A barrier (in the form of the counter) keeps the two groups physically separated. On the teller side of the counter, the layout of the space is organized to allow multiple tellers to focus on individual customers and their needs. If you peek behind the counter, you will see cubicles, each with the necessary equipment (a computer, printer, money counting machines, etc.) for an individual teller to serve a customer’s requests. On the client side of the counter, space is set up to encourage queuing, often by means of a simple tape barrier, and in some cases by using a virtual line such as a log book.

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      A typical bank branch interior encourages customers to queue so that they can be served individually by tellers who sit in stations behind a barrier.

      PHOTO: HTTP://WWW.LOC.GOV/PICTURES/COLLECTION/HH/ITEM/MA0445.PHOTOS.076398P/

      The bank’s internal layout encourages a particular process. One teller deals with

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